Fabric painting is not the most conventional career to choose; in fact, most would relegate it to the hobby list, a dark profession. Some would ask, “Who would want to dedicate their career to fabric painting?” But think about it; if the race was not meaningful, we would all be sitting on soft, colorless, designless furniture, we would probably all be dressed in flour sacks and staring at blank walls. Of course that’s a slight exaggeration, but I’m sure you get the point.
As a career fabric painter, you have the opportunity to add creative value and sometimes color to the world we live in. Although canvas painting can be a laborious task, it has become thousands of times easier to reproduce canvas painting in numerous mediums. With the advent of digital art, reproduced artworks can be placed on cups, plates, textiles, shoes, wood, and more.
The prospects are quite exciting when you think about it. Instead of designers buying that blase fabric for their fashion accessories project, you can now offer them custom fabrics, specially created for their specific use; something unique in your collection. Designers can now say goodbye to boring; and hello happy. Your customers will love you for it.
Artists can now create their masterpieces and have them duplicated for short-run reproduction as easy as or perhaps easier than it would have been to process art through traditional fabric factories. This is great, but there are still some major manufacturing companies that hire artists to create hand-painted designs for their new collections. They then take the artists’ designs and produce them on various types of fabrics.
One career that is easily integrated and is a branch of fabric painting is screen printing, which in itself is a vast field. Traditionally, screen printing has been considered the answer to the production of school shirts and casual wear. Today, the screen printing industry is booming as artists get even more creative and add flair to their designs.
The sizes of the screens have grown from a small square on the front of the shirt to a large format screen designed for all T-shirt design. There are still others who use this method of screen printing to create custom yards for sale and to create their own product line.
Such artworks were initially painted on fabric and later printed on garments for toddlers and adults alike. Just as the original was embellished with studs, stones, sequins and glitter, so are the creations of the screen printing artist. The beauty, of course, is that once the original design has been developed into created fabrics and screens, the design can be produced in unlimited colors, sizes, and of course, quantities.
On the flip side of the screen printing issue are trimmers who are also fabric painters in their own right. These artists take a generally basic design and personalize it, giving it the oomph it may have needed. This is often done with fabric paint, rhinestones, mirrors, ribbons, and many other accessories.